


amid this warm and steady sweetness

by warmfoothills



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cluedo, Horseriding, M/M, Meadows, Tree-climbing, Vocabulary, british daytime tv circa the early 2000s, diy and renovation, draco is a nerd for architecture, fruit! friends! facials!, lakes and ponds, muggle manor houses and magical vineyards, only the incessant mention of them by friends harry throws various objects at, romance novels, sharing (comma bed and clothes), snapdragons - Freeform, steamy barn scenes, the absolute opposite of angst, vague austen-esque references, waxing poetic about white shirts, weddings i guess but there aren’t any bona fide nuptials here, what else is summer for?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 22:16:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20365987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmfoothills/pseuds/warmfoothills
Summary: Harry is not living in a period drama, no matter what his friends or his new house or Malfoy’s sudden affinity for horse-riding might suggest, and if one more person uses the word courting, he’s going to start hexing people.





	amid this warm and steady sweetness

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from august morning by albert garcia. Had the time of my life writing this, honestly, and that’s probably why it’s so soft and wordy and a bit of a love letter to the rural english landscape and its various country houses. Hope you enjoy x

The house in Hampshire, it had to be said, was probably a bit grand for him. It had a foyer and more bedrooms than Harry had pairs of socks and honest-to-god pillars out the front, right on top of the steps that led to the front door. All the windows were paned in neat little squares. The last people to live there, eighty-five years ago, had left behind several valuable tapestries and a library-full of books. The gardens stretched visibly in every direction, and there were no neighbours for miles around.

It was less of a house than a sort of moderately sized stately home really, which was to say, the National Trust hadn’t bothered with it but it would probably have worked as the backdrop for some low-budget television drama set in the nineteenth century. As it was, Harry had bought it the day after he first looked round, so any potential for a life in the limelight was rendered unlikely.

It also had to be said that he might have been just as happy somewhere smaller. More manageable, and with less bannister. Unfortunately (for his bank account, at least), the minute he’d walked in he knew it was the one: it reminded him of Hogwarts in all the best ways, and was so far removed from the modern drudgery of Privet Drive and the gloom of Grimmauld Place that it was perfect.

“What are you going to do with all this  _ space _ ?” his friends had asked, traipsing after him through room after room, their fingertips and feet making patterns in the dust so that it was displaced into the air and danced in the May sunlight streaming through the uncurtained windows.

Harry’d shrugged and thought of tiny, dark cupboards and cramped tents and smiled.

///

“Well, he had no clue what was wrong with it, obviously, because it’s all wired the Muggle way.” Harry set his empty pint glass down on the table. “And I can hardly get an electrician in when half of the light switches only work because I charmed them to. So I’m a bit stuck.”

“Oh please,” Ginny said, deadpan. They were at the pub, too many of them crammed around a table that was probably intended to seat half what they were forcing it to accommodate. “Remind us again how difficult it is for you in your sun-soaked mansion.”

Harry half-heartedly flicked a bottle top at her.

Her description was not, to be fair to her, inaccurate. The day he’d found the place had been the first unexpectedly warm day all year. Winter had dragged on for months, pulling clouds over most of March and leaving April wet and sodden, but the sun had come out right as he walked through the front door, and it hadn’t really stopped shining since. Luna called it a sign, and Harry was rather inclined to believe her.

“Oh, leave off him, Gin,” Ron said, stretching one long arm over Hermione’s head to take a swipe at Ginny, who ducked easily. “Pro-Quidditch salary not all it’s rumoured to be, eh?”

“You know perfectly well, Ronald,” Ginny retorted, pausing to drink through her straw, “that I have quite enough money to move out right now and buy my own bloody mansion, if our mother would let me.”

Harry grimaced at her, sympathetic, amused. He couldn’t really blame Molly for wanting to keep her remaining children close, but the guilt-tripping lengths she went to were entertaining in their extremity and he knew it was a permanent, if well-meaning thorn in Ginny’s side. Molly still hadn’t forgiven Ron for moving out, and his and Hermione’s new place was barely a ten minute walk from The Burrow.

“I’ll come and take a look tomorrow, if you want,” Hermione offered.

The bottle cap sailed back over the table and hit him in the forehead as he nodded.

Hermione came round the next morning because she was the kind of person who followed through and Ginny came with her, likely because  _ she  _ was the kind of person who didn’t like to miss out on any chance to eat Harry’s food.

Hermione clearly didn’t have much more of a clue about the dodgy lighting on the second floor than Harry did, but she at least gave the circuitry several decisive prods with her wand in a way that seemed promising before they collectively shrugged and went back downstairs to make tea. Harry was still getting used to owning a house people actually wanted to be in. None of them had ever been too keen to hang around Grimmauld for too long — himself included — so it was novel that now he barely spent two consecutive days alone without someone or other dropping in. He liked it, in a surprising, warm way, playing the host. It was a nice thought that he’d found somewhere he finally considered his own, and that he could open that home to the people he loved, even if it meant he was constantly restocking his fridge.

They were in his front room, he and Ginny passing a packet of biscuits between them when Hermione, staring out of the window said: “Harry, did you know there’s someone in your front garden?”

“Mm?”

“Well, sort of.” She squinted into the bright sunlight. “On the path.”

Harry didn’t even bother getting up to look. “Oh, it’s Malfoy.”

“ _ Malfoy? _ ”

“He does it about twice a week, just ignore him.” Harry sipped his tea, thinking about how he should really get some curtains up in here. Where did people even get curtains from?

The girls stared at him. “He just rides his— horse past your house twice a week?”

“Yep.”

“Wow.”

“Mhm.”

“I didn’t even know he lived round here,” Ginny said, her eyebrows disappearing into her fringe as she got up to get a better look. 

Harry snorted. “He doesn’t. He’s over the border in Wiltshire, but it’s not far.”

“Right.” She and Hermione were now exchanging looks.

“C’mon,” Harry sighed, standing up as well and catching sight of the back of Malfoy’s blonde head glinting in the sun as he galloped away again. “I’ll make some lunch.”

The kitchen was a huge, cool room, the biggest in the whole house, and Harry loved it. He suspected he’d have to keep a fire going in the large stone grate when the weather got colder but for now it was a nice respite from the summer heat and he liked being able to look out of the window at the back garden as he cooked or ate. He spent a lot of time in there, except on Mondays and Thursdays when Malfoy was most likely to ride past, and then he felt a strange urge to be in the front room, right by the windows with the best view of the path.

He hadn’t been lying to his friends — Malfoy did ride his horse past the house for no apparent reason with alarming regularity — only he hadn’t exactly explained the whole truth either, that sometimes Malfoy stopped and Harry would go outside and talk to him, or sometimes he came over without the horse and wandered after Harry as he weeded, criticising his gardening spells. It’d been happening since the first week Harry had arrived. Malfoy just started showing up and Harry had never told him to get lost and here they were.

Hermione and Ginny, never ones to let an interesting topic drop, continued to discuss Malfoy as Harry put together a cheese board. Oddly, they seemed more confused by the idea of him on horseback than they did by the fact he was willingly seeking out Harry’s attention.

“I suppose the horse adds to the  _ image  _ of it all,” Hermione said, stealing some brie off of the board before Harry had even got the crackers out.

Ginny huffed a laugh. “Yeah, less of an impact if he just walked past on foot.”

Harry almost told them that Malfoy  _ did  _ walk past on foot, and not just past either, right up the front steps and into the house, but had the sense that that would do nothing to help the situation, and went to get the tomatoes instead.

///

The first time Harry saw Malfoy’s new house, he kept his sunglasses on.

Malfoy didn’t actually invite him over, they just ended up there on one of the long walks Malfoy was prone to taking and sometimes managed to convince Harry to accompany him on. Harry thought they’d stumbled into someone’s private property when he saw the high walls (he’d felt the buzz of the wards as they passed through them a few paces back), until Malfoy waved a hand and the gates opened.

It was a lot brighter inside than Harry would have thought due to the frankly incredible amount of windows in every room. In fact, most of the house seemed to be more window than wall. Harry wasn’t sure how it was all staying upright, though Malfoy started lecturing him on the charmwork almost as soon as they walked in.

The effect was pleasant, as far from the darkness of the Manor that Harry could remember as it was possible to be. He liked it and he told Malfoy as much. Malfoy smiled and that was even nicer.

“Of course it’s nowhere near the size of the Manor, but I’d rather live in a one-bedroom  _ flat _ then rot away in there for the rest of my life.”

Harry, privately, agreed. He couldn’t imagine anywhere he’d quite like to live less, except maybe his cupboard.

Malfoy led him through rooms connected with so many hallways and passages and sets of double doors and winding staircases that Harry was sure he’d never find his way out again if he were to be left there alone. He’d thought  _ his _ house was big, but Malfoy’s made it look like the Shrieking Shack. Or possibly somewhere smaller — he couldn’t actually remember how many rooms the shack had. Either way, the simile had escaped him, and the point was that the place was practically labyrinthine, only with more windows.

The only similarity to Harry’s house was the fact that it too was unfinished, though it looked like Malfoy had taken a rather different approach to renovation. Harry was just trying to make his place somewhere nice to live in. Malfoy seemed to be remodelling what was already a ridiculously elaborate building into a sort of modernised chateau.

There was also the fact that this building, unlike Harry’s, was clearly magical. Implausible rooms aside, the floor hummed with magic, the art on the walls was all moving (though Malfoy mostly had a lot of abstracts that didn’t  _ look _ animated until you stared at them for long enough to realise they were, for want of a better word, breathing), and Harry spotted at least two house elves who, distracted from their cleaning, smiled up at him before popping away. In all, the tour took the better part of an hour, and Harry got the impression he hadn’t even seen everything there was to see when Malfoy eventually led them out through a side door into the grounds.

“And you just bought this?” Harry asked, turning to stare back at the house behind them.

Malfoy scoffed. “Don’t be stupid, Potter. It’s been in the family for centuries.”

If the house was big, it was nothing compared to the garden. It was more like several hundred gardens tacked side by side, and there were fields and a short hedge maze and a small forest, which they headed quickly towards in an attempt to escape the heat.

It was nice in the trees, the foliage above them just thick enough to provide shade whilst still letting the sunlight dapple through onto the grass beneath, and the wind was cooling and gentle. 

Malfoy was still talking about his house. Some antique chaise longue he’d wanted to bring over from the Manor was apparently resisting removal from what it considered its rightful home, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

Harry let him talk. He liked to complain and Harry, weirdly, had discovered he liked the sound of his voice. Most of the time he didn’t actually need Harry to listen very hard, and Harry could just sit there and think about other things, like how the tree they now sat propped up against didn’t have a very thick trunk and thus their shoulders were rather close.

“It’s quite difficult for me, you know,” Malfoy sniffed, coming to the end of his rant.

“You have a lake,” Harry pointed out. He’d seen it from an upstairs window.

“Yes, but it’s a very small one.”

“By Hogwarts’ standards maybe.” Harry flicked a small bug off his bare leg and immediately felt guilty about it. “By the standards of every other lake in the country, not so much.”

Malfoy humphed but said nothing. He looked at Harry’s knee and then away again, like it was annoying him. He had to be hot in those trousers but Harry could hardly imagine him taking them off and rather thought he shouldn’t try, if the aim of being out here was to cool down.

“It’s been a difficult adjustment,” Malfoy pressed on, tipping his head back to watch the leaves move in the wind.

Harry stared at his upturned chin and said: “The heart bleeds,” which was such a Malfoy-ish turn of phrase that they were both shocked into silence for a second.

Malfoy recovered first. “Quite. Anyway, as long as the main sitting room is done soon, I suppose I’ll be able to cope.”

///

When Malfoy came over the next day, Harry was sitting in his garden, contemplating whether the afternoon heat had reached an uncomfortable enough level for him to get in the muddy pond that had come with the house, and whether algae was dangerous to one’s health or if it was actually harmless, and just a bit gross.

Malfoy said hello and Harry told him his dilemma and Malfoy exhaled exasperatedly and said, “This is barely a puddle”, which made Harry look sideways at him.

“It’s a pond.”

That got him a disparaging look. Harry thought about how much of his time he was voluntarily spending talking about bodies of water with Malfoy lately.

He sat down and stuck his feet in the water, mostly to annoy Malfoy, but Malfoy sat right down with him, pulling off his shoes and socks. The water was deep enough that Harry’s legs were in all the way up to his shins and Malfoy eyed them before he rolled up his trousers and put his feet in too.

They sat in comfortable silence for a minute, Harry waiting for Malfoy to start complaining about the algae (it was jarringly slimy, the water, and not even that cold) and then:

“Oh god,” Harry said, rocking sideways so that he bumped shoulders with Malfoy. “Something touched my foot.”

Malfoy laughed at him, leaning back further on his hands. “It’s your pond. Don’t you know what’s in it?”

“No,” Harry said, lowering his feet carefully back into the water. “I haven’t had it dredged. It can hardly be anything dangerous, though, can it? This is a muggle property.”

“You don’t need to  _ dredge  _ it to find out what’s in it. This place may be muggle but you, Potter, are not.” He said it like Harry might genuinely have forgotten.

They spent the afternoon pulling things out of the pond with vague summoning charms and a spell Malfoy showed him that he’d apparently invented. It didn’t make the murky water transparent exactly, but it detected shapes that allowed them to have a clearer focus for their  _ Accio _ s. Harry was, embarrassingly, quite impressed.

By the time he lay back on the grass, damp and tired and disproportionately happy considering the amount of algae on his shorts and the number of times Malfoy had called his casting technique “philistilian, at  _ best _ , Potter,” they had a small pile of miscellaneous, water-damaged objects between them and the sun had dropped into the warm, hazy position it took up in the early summer evenings. Malfoy had even managed to pull a huge fish out before he’d made a noise of disgust and thrown it straight back in again.

He looked down at his pond-scum-splattered shirt now and sighed.

“I’ll have to send this off. The elves won’t be able to clean it properly.”

Harry said nothing. How many white shirts did one person need, exactly? Not that Harry  _ minded _ , Malfoy looked good in them, objectively speaking, and he himself was hardly the authority on fashion, of all things, but still. Malfoy never wore anything else. It was annoying the way the shirts always had stupid features that made Harry want to do stupid things, like the one with the pearl buttons that Harry had wanted to slip one by one through their buttonholes, or the one with such a ridiculous amount of ruffle around every hem that Harry had spent a solid fifteen minutes wondering what it would feel like under his fingers, or that one time Malfoy had caught the fabric on something when they were walking and a thread had snagged and Harry had stared at it, imagining taking hold of it and pulling, until the whole thing started to unravel and Malfoy inevitably yelled at him.

“Are you even listening, Potter?”

“No,” Harry said, because he hadn’t been. “Are you still talking about dry cleaning services?”

Malfoy humphed and lay back next to him, getting his shirt even more covered in muck. Harry stared at the side of his head, the way his hair shone a muted gold in the evening sun, and blew out a breath. Malfoy twitched as it hit his ear.

///

Harry started showing up to Malfoy’s unannounced. He figured it was fair play, considering Malfoy never gave him any warning before he came over, and the wards never tried to stop him. The downside to this was that he usually had to wander around for a while before he found whichever room Malfoy was in.

The other downside (or, the complete antithesis of a downside, really, if Harry were being honest with himself) was that Malfoy was often mid-project, wand out and eyes narrowed in concentration, pushing his hair distractedly back from his face with one hand.

Like this morning, for example: Harry had found him in a top floor room and his sleeves were rolled up and he didn’t have any socks or shoes on. Harry leaned heavily back against the wall.

“What do you think?” Malfoy asked, apparently unsurprised by Harry’s sudden appearance because he didn’t look over as he said it, keeping his eyes on the skylight in the ceiling. “Bigger?”

Harry thought if it was any bigger he may as well just make the entire roof transparent, though he had the sense not to say this out loud — it’d probably only give Malfoy ideas.

Malfoy hummed to himself. “I think it’ll have to do for now. Wouldn’t want to jeopardise the structural integrity of the roof.” 

“Certainly not,” Harry said, and Malfoy finally looked at him.

He rolled his eyes. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

Harry followed him out and down the hall, across a landing and up a couple of steps into a white room where the floor was boarded in a bleached, pale wood. It was empty, but it was obvious what Malfoy wanted him to look at. A huge, stained glass window was set into the opposite wall.

The light refracting through it painted the whole room in different colours, greens and blues and purples, turning the floor into a cool-toned kaleidoscope and dyeing Malfoy’s hair a pale seafoam shade.

Harry stared at him. He flushed a bit (the pink colour coming up lavender through the prism of light) but folded his arms.

“It’s a bit  _ much _ , I know,” he said, defiantly. “But it reminds me of—”

“The Slytherin common room,” Harry finished for him, watching how the light seemed to ripple across the walls like water.

“Well, yes,” he agreed, a bit too flustered to ask how exactly Harry knew what the Slytherin common room looked like. The resemblance wasn’t that strong — from what Harry remembered, the dungeon common room had felt dark and cool, not unwelcoming, but a different kind of comfortable than Gryffindor tower, more luxurious and less cosy. This room was far from dark, and looked as if it was suspended just below the surface of a sunlit pool, rather than buried at the bottom of a fathoms-deep loch.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet,” Malfoy said, walking over to the window and fingering the panes of glass gently. “I’ve too many bedrooms already, and it’s too small for a decent sized dining or ballroom.”

“Billiards room?” Harry asked, snorting a laugh. Malfoy didn’t get the joke. 

///

Harry was up a tree. He was also, maybe, a little stuck. 

It wasn’t like he’d had time to climb a lot of trees for fun as a kid — it had always been out of desperation when running from bullies and/or small, vicious bulldogs. He associated the feel of bark scraping against his palms with an odd sort of childhood panic. Even at The Burrow, whose orchard was full of the type of trees that would have been perfect for any kind of tree-climbing related rehabilitation he might have wanted to indulge in, they’d all been much too busy flying to bother. The view from the top of a just-strong-enough-hold-your-weight apple branch was hardly comparable to the one from a broomstick.

Despite this gap in his adolescent knowledge, he’d decided it couldn’t be that hard. It had even been fun at first, using his muscles to pull himself up, twisting the stalks until the apples broke away, and he was convinced the fruit would taste better if he picked it by hand. The problem was that he’d never quite mastered the art of getting back down. When he was younger he’d just sort of jumped and somehow landed safely, something he assumed he had his early, dormant magic to thank for, but he was a bit heavier now, and he wasn’t sure he’d get the same result.

He’d already levitated the full basket to the ground, and was just deciding he might as well at least try to shimmy back down rather than stepping blindly into thin air, when a noise from somewhere to his left made him jump, and he lost his grip on the branch above him.

It was Malfoy, whose timing was, as ever, impeccable, and who appeared as if summoned, just as Harry was thinking it was a good thing he wasn’t around to witness Harry stuck up a tree like a lost cat.

“Did you— fall out?” Malfoy asked, peering down at Harry and looking like he desperately wanted to laugh.

“No,” Harry said petulantly, even though it was quite obvious he had. “I wanted to come down.”

Which was true, in a sense.

“Mhm.” Malfoy glanced away and his composure slipped for a second, long enough for Harry to see his smile break free, and then he pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and got himself together again. “Face first, apparently?”

“I’m on my back.”

Malfoy was even attractive upside down, he noticed irritably.

“So you are.”

He made no move to help so Harry scrambled up himself, fairly sure he had grass stains all over him and a bit winded, but otherwise unharmed. Malfoy picked an apple from the basket and bit into it.

“Help yourself,” Harry said sarcastically.

Malfoy hummed, chewing.

“These are rather good,” he said, when he’d swallowed, starting to walk back towards the house with no warning, evidently assuming Harry would just follow him like some kind of small dog. Harry did, obviously, but it was the presumption of the thing. “I’m partial to a granny smith, usually, but these are pretty yummy.”

Harry snorted — because really,  _ yummy _ , pronounced in Malfoy’s plummy accent, and who, outside of the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, even used words like that? — and fell into step beside him, the basket hooked onto the crook of his elbow.

“Honestly, I’m lucky all this was here when I bought the place. Do you know how long it takes to grow an apple tree?”

“Yes,” Malfoy said, only it sounded like  _ obviously. _

They made turnovers because Harry had some pre-rolled pastry in the freezer and it was too hot to faff about with anything complicated. He’d sort of expected to be the one chopping and stewing and shaping whilst Malfoy sat around and looked disconcertingly at home in Harry’s sunlit kitchen, but Malfoy turned out to be a dab hand at peeling charms and had all the apple skins off and the cores out in about thirty seconds flat, after refusing to even touch the hand peeler Harry tried to give him. (“What is  _ that  _ torture device, Potter? Are you trying to skin me or the apples?”)

Whilst the pastries were in the oven, Malfoy told him about how his expansion charm in the third floor bathroom kept failing and shrinking the room back to its original size, which was apparently not large enough to contain the four hundred litre capacity bath he’d installed. Harry cleaned up the flour and sugar that had gotten all over the table by hand in an attempt to prevent himself from focussing too hard on baths in relation to Malfoy and put the kettle on. They ate the turnovers warm from the oven. Harry learned that Malfoy drank his tea strong and milky and precisely what it sounded like when he swore through a mouthful of too-hot sweetened apple. 

///

“I’m bored.”

Harry looked over to where Ginny was slumped sideways against the edge of the bath. Officially, she was supposed to be helping him tile the wall. Unofficially, she and Neville and Luna were playing exploding snap and getting the tile adhesive paste all over the place. Luna was actually sitting  _ in  _ the bath, which was empty, and not even attempting to pretend she was doing anything useful.

“Well, you could actually help, rather than just sitting there,” Harry said, trying to get a stubborn tile to stay put with a combination of grout and a strong sticking charm. He’d discovered he was actually pretty shit at DIY, but he was persevering.

Ginny made a dismissive noise. “I mean something fun. You should have a party.”

“Ooh,” Luna said. “I love parties.”

“What, like an ‘I’ll provide beer if you all come over and help me redecorate’ kind of party?” Harry asked hopefully.

“ _ No _ ,” Ginny said. “We do that already.” She ignored his pointed look at the three of them sitting there. Neville, at least, had re-organised Harry’s tool bag in between rounds. “A normal party.”

At Harry’s skeptical look she got up and took the trowel out of his hands. “C’mon,” she said imploringly. “You never even had a housewarming when you moved in.”

“That’s because you lot are round here all the time anyway,” Harry reminded her. “And I hardly felt the place needed some kind of initiation celebration after you and Ron christened it by almost setting fire to my new sofa the first night I invited you over.”

Ginny gave him an odd look. “Why are you doing that?”

“What?” Harry asked, bewildered.

“Talking like that. You sound like Hermione. Or,” her eyes flashed and then narrowed, corner of her mouth twitching in amusement. Harry stared at her.

“How’s Malfoy doing?” she asked innocently. “I’m sure  _ he’d  _ appreciate being invited to an  _ initiation celebration _ .”

Harry gave her a withering look, which apparently only added to her amusement. His friends had found out about all the time he’d been spending with Malfoy, of course, because half the time they came over to see Harry he wasn’t home, but was out somewhere listening to Malfoy lament the lack of decent wizarding shops in the South West, or helping him rearrange furniture.

He sighed and gave the tiling up as a job that would require more concentration than he was currently capable of giving it, with a determinedly distracted Ginny tugging at his arm, and they all went downstairs to find the others, Ginny to tell them about the party that was apparently going to happen whether Harry wanted it to or not.

“Oh,  _ that  _ kind of party,” Ron said meaningfully when she — the traitor — mentioned Malfoy. “Are you inviting all of the eligible bachelors in the neighbouring counties, or just the one who’s trying to court you?”

Ginny snorted. Harry flopped into an armchair and very maturely pretended he couldn’t hear them talking about whether Ron should wear a top hat.

“I could present you, if you like,” he directed at Harry. “Announce you before you descend the staircase.”

Harry threw a cushion at him.

///

On the whole, Harry thought, the night was going pretty well. He was a bit drunk and he’d only been forced to revoke Ginny’s DJ privileges once for trying to play the wizarding wedding march.

The party was the good, overwarm, loud kind where all the windows had to be pushed open and people were spilling out onto the lawns and doing the kind of dancing that belonged in dodgy clubs and not the kind of ballroom-esque moves that Harry imagined Malfoy had probably been taught as soon as he could walk. There were no strange suit jackets or long skirts in sight, unless you counted Luna, who was wearing both, and Harry thought, honestly, she could wear whatever the hell she wanted. He thought everyone could really, only if any of the rest of them had shown up wearing that he would have taken it as a joke at his expense.

Even Malfoy was dressed relatively normally, his jeans tight and dark and his shirt practically plain with only the smallest hint of embroidery at the cuffs and collar and breast pocket. Harry had ended up inviting him by proxy, though he was apparently offended enough to not have been personally asked that he’d been ignoring Harry all night. Or maybe he was just feeling dramatic.

“You could just, you know,” Hermione said, prodding him in the shoulder. “Go talk to him.”

She was sitting on the kitchen counter, something she only did when she’d had at least three glasses of wine. Harry turned from where he’d been watching Malfoy laughing with Luna in the hallway and raised his eyebrows at her in faux confusion.

“Who?”

She hit him on the shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry said, swallowing more of his drink and grimacing. Ginny had made it, and he wasn’t entirely sure what was actually in it. “Can you leave my shoulder alone?”

Hermione huffed a breath, having just whacked his shoulder again. “What was the point of inviting him if you’re just going to stare at him all night?”

“Well that sort of  _ was _ the point of inviting him,” Harry sighed and then flushed brilliantly. Damn Ginny and her heavy-handed pouring.

Hermione laughed at him.

“You’re hopeless, Harry Potter.” She downed the rest of her glass and jumped down, giving him a last thump on the shoulder as she passed. “Hopeless.”

///

Malfoy invited him over for breakfast on Sunday, an actual fucking invite with an owl and everything, which Harry frankly found over the top. He apparated over there anyway.

The house-elves had laid out a ridiculous amount of food in the breakfast room (and he only knew it was called that because it had been embossed onto the invitation, along with the date and time and other words like _cordially _and _requests the pleasure of your company_, phrases Harry thought were more suited to a wedding and not a bloody breakfast— date? Was it a date? Part of Harry thought it might just be Malfoy’s idea of teaching him a lesson in proper invitation etiquette). Pastries and bowls of fruit and scones and bread still steaming from the oven sat on delicate, finely painted china and Malfoy was drinking tea out of an incongruously ugly mug in the shape of a Goblin’s head.

Surprisingly, he didn’t insist they sit down formally to eat and instead told Harry to take whatever he wanted, piled his own plate high with several danishes and a pile of berries, and carried it all through to the sunlit parlour next door.

The room was mostly empty; Malfoy clearly hadn’t got round to it yet, but Harry didn’t mind. He sat on the bare floorboards because there was no furniture, excluding the large piano by the window. Malfoy sat on the piano bench and ate his breakfast, picking the pecans off his pastry and eating raspberries one by one off of his fingertips. Then he started playing.

Whilst it was hardly surprising that Malfoy could play, it was still interesting to watch. Harry had never really heard a lot of classical music — Aunt Petunia had sometimes played it on the radio when she’d been cooking or cleaning, but she’d turned it off whenever Dudley was watching TV because he claimed it drowned out the sound. Uncle Vernon had been of the opinion that all music fell into one of two categories: incessant noise or poncey nonsense, and he wasn’t a fan of either.

It felt like it suited the morning, at least, the soft lilting of the piano and the slant of the sun through the windowpanes, the way Malfoy kept flicking his head back absently whenever his hair fell forward into his face, and how everything smelt citrussy and warm.

He looked up at Harry during a lull in the melody.

“It’s nice.” Harry wonkily quartered an orange with a nonverbal  _ Diffindo _ .

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he focussed on the wandless display, but then his expression cleared and he snorted quietly. “I know. It’s Chopin.”

His hands kept moving as he spoke and Harry watched the light play across his face as he sucked juice off of his thumb. Malfoy’s fingers were much longer than his own. It probably wasn’t a good idea to be thinking too hard about that, particularly not with said fingers in his mouth. Said fingers being  _ his  _ fingers, obviously, not Malfoy’s.

He got up and went over to get a closer look when he’d finished eating, and Malfoy moved over on the bench to make room and pulled Harry down next to him. He actually made him hold out his hands for a cleaning charm before he let him touch the keys (his magic cool and smooth on Harry’s skin) but then he was surprisingly patient, trying to explain about things like scales and the treble clef.

Harry was so bad at it (due mostly, he liked to think, because the piano stool was small and he had all five-foot-nine-and-a-bit of Malfoy pressed up against one side of him, his elbow constantly knocking into Harry’s ribs, and it was troublingly distracting) that in the end Malfoy just laughed and gave up and showed him how to push the pedal instead and when to lift his foot at the right time so that the notes slurred together in the correct way.

///

Sometime midway through July, Malfoy pronounced himself unable to spend another minute inside trying to make his walls cooperate when the weather was this nice, and told Harry it was about time he learned how to ride a horse.

“C’mon, it’s  _ easy _ , Potter. I learned when I was five,” he said.

Most kids were learning to ride bikes at that age, Harry thought, (though not him, for obvious reasons). Still, it was hardwired into him to accept challenges from Malfoy, so he shrugged and followed him into the stables that sat an acre or two away from the house.

Malfoy fussed around with saddles and bridles and other things Harry had never seen before whilst Harry wandered up and down. There were four horses that he could see, their heads poking over the swing doors of their stalls and watching him warily. One of them was very clearly Malfoy’s. Well, they were all Malfoy’s, obviously, but this one was so pale it was almost bright white, and looked proud and skittish. It gave Harry an annoyed look (if horses were capable of such things) but accepted his outstretched hand easily enough, snuffling into his palm and blinking long-lashed eyes at him.

“Right, come on,” Malfoy said from behind him. Harry turned. He had his wand out and was brandishing it in a vaguely threatening manner. “You can’t have your trouser legs flapping about, it’s a hazard.”

Harry raised bemused eyebrows at him. “Sorry, my jodhpurs were in the wash.”

Malfoy either missed or chose to ignore the heavy sarcasm. “It’s fine,” he sighed, put-upon. “I’ll just,” and he pointed his wand at Harry’s jeans until the cuffs cinched to his ankle.

“I’d let you borrow some of mine, but they’d be too long in the leg,” he added archly, inspecting his spellwork.

Harry rolled his eyes at the reference to their height difference and shifted in his newly tight jeans. He didn’t know why Malfoy needed to make them fit snug all over — his thighs felt like they were close to bursting out of the hot denim. “Yes, yes, you’re the paragon of height and stature.”

Malfoy looked exorbitantly pleased at this, even though Harry had meant it as a joke and was mostly sure it had come out that way. Often Malfoy just got weirdly happy when Harry used words like  _ paragon _ , as if he — like Ginny, apparently — thought his influence was personally responsible for improving Harry’s vocabulary.

It really was a glorious day, bright and warm, but with enough wind to stop the heat from becoming too much. Harry got out of Malfoy’s way as he went to do whatever one did to a horse in order to prepare it for a fully grown human to get on its back, and waited in the stable doorway, pulling his hair back and securing it with a tie from his wrist to get it out of his eyes as much as possible, though the breeze still pulled tendrils out and around his face. Malfoy paused what he was doing to stare over at him, seemingly without realising, because then he blushed when he caught Harry’s eye and turned away quickly.

“Is it like riding a Thestral?” Harry called over to him.

“When did you—?” Malfoy started and then shook his head, guiding a halter over the nose of a deep brown horse. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. I’d imagine it’s  _ easier  _ than riding a Thestral, Potter, or a Hippogriff or whatever other winged beasts you’ve been flying around on. These ones tend to stay on the ground and can’t unseat you with their  supracoracoideus.”

Harry wondered how exactly Malfoy knew about the anatomy of said winged beasts when he’d spent every one of their Care of Magical Creatures lessons oscillating gleefully between boredom and vindictive disruption, but was distracted from asking when Malfoy gently led the horse out of its stall so that Harry was confronted up close for the first time by the sheer height of it.

“Don’t forget the dragon,” he said, remembering the terrifying way he’d clung on to the dragon’s back and deciding he wasn’t going to be intimidated by a horse. He determinedly lifted his foot and hooked it into the stirrup but his trainer got lodged weirdly — it was higher off the ground than he’d thought — so he ended up standing there awkwardly with one leg pulled up. Malfoy looked helplessly amused but moved over to help, one calming hand steady on the horse’s flank. Harry dug his fingers into Malfoy’s shoulder harder than was probably necessary in retaliation as he hoisted himself up and over, the muscle under his hand irritatingly firm.

“There,” Malfoy said, once Harry was properly seated, smoothing over the horse’s neck so that his fingers came dangerously close to Harry’s calf. “No scales, and no risk of being set on fire.”

“Just the possibility of falling off and being trampled.”

Malfoy rolled his eyes and passed Harry’s reigns to him, collecting his own horse and mounting it so effortlessly that Harry glared. He pulled around to face Harry with barely a nudge at the reigns and smirked.

“Ready?”

“No,” Harry said, and carefully pressed his heels into his horse to get it to follow Malfoy anyway.

It was nothing at all like riding a broom but Harry had to admit, once they got into it, that the speed was fun and that there was something thrilling about moving atop something so alive, something that had been born to run and not a piece of wood that couldn’t think for itself. He suspected there were charms holding him in the saddle, or he likely would have fallen off by now (Malfoy had become bored by the gentle beginners’ trot he had promised within about ten minutes and had goaded Harry into racing before they’d even gone a mile from the house), but it was nice to lean into the magic and let it surround him as he tried to keep up with Malfoy’s gallop. It was nice, too, to watch Malfoy: how he maneuvered as easily as breathing, how obvious it was that this was something that came naturally to him. At school he’d flown on a broomstick like he’d been doing it his whole life, but seeing him excel at this felt different somehow, maybe because it was something Harry himself wasn’t so good at. And he obviously loved it, if the look on his face was anything to go by. He kept letting out these ridiculous whoops that Harry felt he really should not have found as endearing as he did.

It was absolute murder on his thighs of course, and his balls had definitely seen more comfortable days, but the countryside was beautiful and the wind refreshing as it whipped at the hair escaping from its tie.

“You’re not  _ bad _ ,” Malfoy said after a bit, when he’d slowed enough for Harry to catch up and they were heading along side by side across a field and towards a winding, hedge-lined road.

“I think I’m doing an excellent job of not falling off,” Harry said.

The road, when they reached it, was pretty deserted, other than the odd car which would come along and slow down as it passed them. Harry nodded at every driver in thanks, suppressing a grin at the stares Malfoy got. He did look faintly ridiculous, in a sort of regal, impressive way, sitting astride his horse with his hair blowing in the breeze like that.

When they came across a family out for a walk in the countryside, the small girl gaped up at them. Harry smiled conspiratorially at her brother, who was rolling his eyes at his sister’s excitement.

“Was that a  _ prince _ , dad?” they heard her say once they’d trotted past. Malfoy grinned all the way back to his stables.

///

In comparison to the kind of activities Malfoy dragged him into, being with Harry’s friends was normal and easy. They didn’t do things like try to take him on absurdly long walks or let their pale hair fall artfully into their faces, making Harry’s brain short-circuit for a good few seconds. Instead they piled into his house in various groups whenever they could, falling through the Floo or apparating into the front garden, and demolished the bread he’d spent all day baking in under ten minutes, played and cheated their way through the exceptional number of board games Neville seemed to own and was always bringing over and leaving in the library, or, very occasionally, helped him fix and paint things in various rooms.

“I don’t think that’s actually doing anything,” Harry said to Ginny one stormy Thursday. She’d spellotaped sandpaper to her feet and was gliding half-heartedly across the exposed floorboards in one of the bedrooms. The weather had turned and it was a horrible day by anyone’s standards, though Harry liked the rain in summer, when it was wild and warm and smelled lovely, especially out here away from the sticky wet heat of London.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Luna said from her position crossed-legged under the open window. “Everything does something, I think.”

Ginny gave Harry a triumphant smile and continued her slow and rather bad impression of an ice-dancer. He went back to lining the skirting boards with tape.

Though he would never tell them, he liked being around just the two of them. It was weird, he knew, what with his and Ginny’s history, but there was something about the way she and Luna were together — steady, he thought, and uncomplicated — that settled him. He sometimes felt the same way with Ron and Hermione, their love so obvious that it had become comfortable and commonplace, but they also often made him lonely. He was trying not to fixate on it all too much. It was firmly situated in the box in his mind labelled “Probably don’t inspect this too closely”, which was now so full of Malfoy-related thoughts that it was getting harder and harder to close the metaphorical cardboard flaps.

Luna and Ginny left that afternoon, after eating the last of the good soup Molly had given him out of his fridge and pressing kisses to either of his cheeks, Luna’s soft and affectionate, Ginny’s wet and sarcastic.

It left Harry bored and restless. He’d become used to having people around and he hadn’t seen Malfoy since last week, when he’d gotten home tired and smelling of horse just in time for  _ Changing Rooms _ , and had sat through a double episode before he realised he hadn’t unshrunk his jeans.

Before he could second-guess himself he walked over there, thinking that if Malfoy wasn’t up for doing anything, he could at least get some fresh air.

It took Malfoy a long time to answer the door. Admittedly, Harry had never actually knocked before, he usually just went straight in, but he was sure Malfoy would not react well to Harry traipsing mud across his carpets.

When he opened the door he looked at Harry as if no one had ever used the knocker in all the time he’d lived there. “It’s raining,” he said, instead of hello.

“Yes.”

Malfoy continued to stare at him.

“You’ve  _ flown  _ in worse conditions than this, Malfoy,” Harry said, assuming he would understand that Harry was inviting him out without Harry having to actually ask. Whether he shut the door in Harry’s face or went to get his coat, Harry hoped he would make up his mind quickly. It was getting harder to maintain his umbrella charm when confronted with the pale triangle of skin that was exposed by the open top few buttons of Malfoy’s shirt.

“Alright.” Malfoy summoned a coat with one outstretched hand and toed his socked feet into a pair of boots that were sitting just inside the front door. They moulded tight to his calves as he put them on. Harry looked away.

It wasn’t raining particularly heavily but the direction of the wind meant Harry’s umbrella charm, though he stretched it to cover both of them as they set off down the path, wasn’t keeping them especially dry. Malfoy wasn’t complaining. The rain suited him, Harry thought, though he also looked nice when the sun turned his skin slightly pink and picked out the strands of gold in his hair. Or maybe Harry was just embarrassing.

They did actually end up flying when they’d walked all the way back to Harry’s, Harry unwilling to leave the damp, clean air when the weather had been too shit to be outside much over the past week. He hadn’t been out on his broom for too long, and not with Malfoy since Hogwarts, which seemed like a waste of all the private land he now owned.

Malfoy made a bit of a show of reluctance, begrudgingly taking the spare Nimbus Harry had in his shed and sighing: “Only for you, Potter, would I risk getting blown off my broom,” and then seemed to realise he’d said something a bit too revealing, because his face went very red and he kicked off at once, soaring up into the air. Despite the rain, Harry’s whole body stayed warm the entire two hours they were out there, throwing apples at each other and flying through clouds.

///

“Merlin’s balls, it’s too hot.” Ron flopped backwards onto the grass. “Hot  _ as  _ Merlin’s balls. Hotter, in fact.”

Hermione’s nose wrinkled in distaste. 

The sun was out again in full, tangible force in that way it sometimes got after days of rain, the heat dry and direct, and they were making the most of it, lying on the grass outside the back door, Harry wishing someone’d thought to bring a blanket out — the grass needed cutting and it was tickling the backs of his knees uncomfortably. Luna and Ginny were stringing flowers together, Ron was dozing, occasionally rousing himself for long enough to complain about the heat before rolling over and closing his eyes again, and Hermione was reading something and generally ignoring the lot of them.

Harry stared at Ron’s hand resting casually on her back and remembered the press of Malfoy’s hand when he’d helped him off the horse last week (Harry’s legs stiff and wobbly, Malfoy clearly biting back a laugh but still holding steady and strong until Harry’d got his feet under him again) and then instantly regretted that train of thought when Luna piped up. She had an uncanny ability to pounce on fleeting thoughts that passed through his head, leaving him unconvinced she didn’t have some latent Legilimency skills she wasn’t telling them about.

“How’s it going with Draco?” she asked, shading her eyes from the sun to look over at Harry. Behind her, Ginny made an amused noise, and Hermione put down her book. Harry narrowed his eyes.

“What do you mean?” he said. “How’s what going?”

“Oh, you know,” Luna said airily.

“Yes, how  _ is  _ that going?” Hermione rolled onto her side to look at him properly.

“There is no  _ that _ ,” Harry said deliberately. “I don’t know why you all keep going on about it. He’s not some— some maiden I’m trying to court.” He scowled.

“Oh,” Hermione said, surprised eyebrows raising. “I don’t think anyone was suggesting  _ you  _ were the one doing the courting here. He’s clearly the pursuer in this scenario. You’re just doing a lot of—”

“Swooning?” Ginny suggested. She threaded another daisy into Luna’s hair.

“Allowing yourself to be wooed?” added Ron.

Harry scowled harder. “That,” he said, “is heteronormative bullshit.” He fixed them all with a stern look he doubted they could even see through his sunglasses, hoping he’d at least impress Hermione enough with a polysyllabic word that she’d back off, but she only laughed at him and went back to her book. He’d forgotten that only really worked on Malfoy, and only then because Harry was pretty sure it amused him to watch Harry try to sound like an intellectual. Not that that was what Harry  _ was  _ trying to do. Being around Malfoy just rubbed off on him, that was all.

And now he was thinking about Malfoy  _ rubbing off on him _ .

“It’s ok, Harry,” Luna said. “I think it’s sweet.”

Harry guiltily drew his thoughts back from the decidedly not-so-sweet path they were headed down and made a noncommittal noise. He wasn’t confirming anything.

///

“Potter, if I hadn’t spent six years at school with you I’d think you didn’t know what a wand  _ was _ .”

It was Sunday, the morning bright and blustery, and Malfoy had found him hanging out washing on the line that stretched between two trees in the back garden.

Harry ignored him. He knew there were spells, and the estate agent who’d shown him around the place had babbled on about “mod cons” and “updating the fixtures” with all number of “white goods” but it seemed a shame not to use the line if it was there. Besides, his laundry charms were passable at best and there was something about clothes strung up and blowing in the wind that tugged at some weird, domestic ache inside of him.

He was just grateful he’d decided to wash the bed linen and towels today, and not his dirty pants.

“Do you even know household spells?” he asked Malfoy, pegging down one end of a pillow case that was trying to escape. He supposed he could have at least used magic to get the clothes onto the line, but he’d started it like this now, and he wasn’t going to get his wand out just because Malfoy thought he should.

Malfoy made a dismissive noise, which meant no, and went into the kitchen through the back door, assumedly to make himself tea and do the crossword in the weekend Prophet before Harry had a chance to get at it.

Harry sighed and held out for a solid minute before he shook his wand out of his sleeve, sent the remaining pile of damp sheets sailing up to hang themselves on the line, and followed Malfoy inside.

///

It didn’t occur to Harry to really question what exactly he and Malfoy were doing until the week before his birthday. The dynamic between them was odd, only not in a bad way, more in a way that filled Harry with a weird, pleasant energy and made him do things like break into a smile at seemingly random moments. He hadn’t decided what he was doing for his birthday yet and the realisation that, whatever it ended up being, he wanted Malfoy there, had come as more of a shock than he’d been expecting. Why exactly his brain had decided to get all introspective now, he didn’t know, considering it’d been weeks since he and Malfoy had become friends. Or whatever they were.

Regardless, he was thinking so hard about it all that he accidentally made enough lasagna to feed fifteen people and had to send off Patronuses to see if anyone was free. Of course, at the prospect of food, literally everyone was available, or quickly made themselves so, and it became a sort of informal, unplanned get together. Neville turned up with wine and Ron brought a rhubarb crumble with him from The Burrow (he’d been having dinner with his parents when he’d got the message but, being Ron, he had two helpings of lasagna anyway).

They ate in the living room, squashing themselves into the limited sofa space and fighting for the remote. The TV worked pretty well because of the lack of inherent magic built into the house, though they had to be careful about doing too many spells when it was on if they wanted to keep it functioning and generally spark-free. Once a three-firewhiskys-deep Seamus had accidentally performed an overly enthusiastic  _ Accio _ near it and every channel had been dubbed in Spanish for five days.

Sometimes Harry thought he’d only bought it in the first place out of some lingering fuck-you to the Dursleys, a leftover childhood need to make it up to his small, television-deprived self of fifteen years ago, but it was good background noise and he liked when everyone was crammed around it, shouting their opinions at the screen. They all claimed to hate the property-hunting shows Harry was always putting on — Hermione called it pensioner television and the others were baffled by muggle architecture — but he suspected they secretly enjoyed hate-watching it with him, especially when they’d had a few.

“One small silencing charm and it wouldn’t  _ matter  _ that their dream house is too close to a main road,” Ron said, shaking his head.

Harry was wondering what Malfoy’s opinion on programmes like this would be when Neville turned to him as the screen cut to an advert break and said, through a yawn: “How’s the courtship going?”

“We’re not courting!” Harry leaned grumpily back against the armchair, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t know who Neville was talking about.

Neville held up his hands. “Sorry, I’m just going on what Ginny told me.”

Harry turned his glare on Ginny, who snickered, wriggling further down on the sofa.

“What  _ do _ you actually do with him?” Hermione asked.

Harry felt his face growing hot and was glad the room was dark. He felt suddenly defensive, even though the question of his relationship to Malfoy was what had started this lasagna party to begin with. “I don’t know, the same kind of things I do with you.”

“Draco likes cheap wine and bad telly?” Luna said, sounding genuinely interested. She was the only one who called Malfoy by his first name.

Ron snorted loudly.

“No. I don’t know!” Harry said again. “We walk around, I guess. He shows me whatever new room he’s unnecessarily magicked onto the side of his house. We went horse-riding the other day.”

“Oh  _ Merlin _ ,” Ginny breathed, delighted.

“Do you play croquet too? Did he invite you in for high tea?”

Harry lobbed a screwed up napkin at Ron’s head, but couldn’t help grinning. It  _ was  _ sort of ridiculous when he stopped to think about it. He’d never had any desire to get on the back of a horse until Malfoy had suggested it, and he definitely didn’t usually care about the intricacies of architectural charmwork, unless, apparently, Malfoy was the one talking about it.

“Look at him,” crowed George, who Ron had managed to drag away from stock intake at the shop and who was now eating what was left of the crumble straight out of the dish. He gestured at Harry’s face with his spoon. “Smiling like a loon. This is worse than you and that Lavender girl in sixth year, Ronald,” which made Harry scowl again, but at least had the added benefit of forcing Ron to join him in his embarrassment.

///

When it finally came around, Harry spent his birthday at The Burrow, eating far too much food and picking Mr Weasley’s brain on how best to build the chest of drawers that had been sitting flat-packed in a spare bedroom for weeks. He’d somehow lost the instructions and was hoping for some advice, though it didn’t turn out to be a particularly helpful conversation because Charlie was visiting and had brought some dragon-smoked firewhisky over with him from Romania, which he plied both of his parents with until Mr Weasley was hiccuping and talking excitedly about drills and Mrs Weasley got weepy and tried to get everyone to eat fourth helpings of cake.

He didn’t end up seeing Malfoy at all, and Malfoy didn’t mention it when they next saw each other, but he did give Harry a Persian rug under the pretext that it didn’t go with his interior decor and thus he needed rid of it, so Harry counted it as a win. He hadn’t given Malfoy a present on his birthday, so it was hardly fair of him to expect anything more.

Ron and Hermione came over the day after, a rare just-the-three-of-them night, and he showed them the progress he’d made in the parlour as they stumbled out of the fireplace. He didn’t like calling the room that, but it’s what Malfoy had referred to it as, and now he couldn’t think of it as anything else.

“Very nice, Harry,” Hermione said, lifting the corner of the new rug with one foot.

Ron picked up a vase from a small table by the fireplace. It was the one that had come out of Harry’s pond, and cleaning it had revealed a truly awful floral pattern on the china beneath. “I reckon this might be worth something, you know.”

“And what would you know about it?” asked Hermione, raising her eyebrows at him.

Ron shrugged. “They’re always showing stuff like this on that antiques thing from the telly.”

Harry exchanged an amused look with Hermione.  _ He  _ definitely hadn’t been watching _ Antiques Roadshow _ , so Ron must have been putting it on himself.

“All this time thinking you were going to turn into your mother,” Hermione said, “and I never thought to worry you’d become your dad.”

Harry laughed at Ron’s stricken look.

“I’m not optimistic,” he said to him, taking the vase and putting it back on the table. Malfoy had called it a “baroque nightmare”, but Harry hadn’t been sure if that was a compliment or not, and still had no idea what baroque meant.

In truth, Harry hadn’t gotten rid of any of the things they’d pulled out of his pond that day, even the rusted old tin can, and he didn’t particularly want to examine why. Most of them were sitting in a pile in the small room off the kitchen that Harry used for storing his mop, except for things like the vase that he’d thought were nice enough to display. Although, really, he’d only put the vase in such a prominent position to watch Malfoy roll his eyes when he saw it. It was particularly ugly.

They went through to the kitchen, where Harry made pasta and they opened a bottle of wine and Ron won at chess three times in a row, even though Harry and Hermione teamed up in an attempt to try and take him down and cheated horribly.

The conversation about the vase was forgotten, until Ron went to get more wine from the shelf in the utility-room-cum-drinks-cupboard and made a noise of disgust.

“Mate,  _ why  _ exactly do you have a half-drowned teddy bear in here?” he called back, and Harry fought down a blush. Ron had clearly found the pile.

They couldn’t possibly know why he was hanging on to a load of water-logged rubbish, but the look Hermione shot Ron when he walked back in was still far too knowing for Harry’s peace of mind.

///

Malfoy’s lake was outrageously big. Harry could see the other side of it, but it seemed a long way away. It had a little jetty thing on one side, wooden, with reeds growing up in between the boards, and he guessed it would take a good hour or two to walk the whole way round it. Fortunately, Malfoy wasn’t suggesting they tried, and was instead throwing stones into the water.

“Are you actually trying to make them skip?” Harry asked, in up to his ankles and shielding his eyes from the sun as he watched Malfoy plop a couple more pebbles in with a bad underarm throw.

Malfoy frowned. “No,” he shot back, but he let Harry come over and show him how to do it properly anyway. Harry tried to explain, skipping a few stones himself in demonstration, and Malfoy got a bit better, managing to get a couple of bounces in before his rocks sank like, well, rocks.

“It’s your arm.” Harry waded further over, slipping a bit on the slimy ground of the lake bed. “Like this,” and then he was just holding Malfoy’s elbow and they were both standing there looking at each other, faces close.

“Right,” Malfoy said, but he didn’t turn away, and the stone slid out of his hand, unnoticed. The only noise was their breathing, Harry conscious of how loud his suddenly sounded, and the gentle lapping of the water against the shore.

“I,” Harry said, swallowed, and a duck took off from the surface of the lake, breaking the strange tension and startling him so much that he lost his footing for a second, overcorrected in an attempt to keep his balance, and slipped straight in.

Malfoy laughed so hard he almost fell over himself, which meant it only took one mild tripping jinx to send him stumbling right into the water with Harry. The way the ground sloped down from the bank into the lake meant it was hardly deep, but he still got wet all up one side.

“Oh, fuck you, Potter,” he sighed good-naturedly, laughter trailing off, leaving Harry to wonder if he’d imagined that weird, intense eye-contact they’d just shared. “How many of my shirts are you trying to ruin?”

_ All of them _ , Harry thought absently, if it meant Malfoy would take them off like he was doing now. He balled it up and sent it flying over to hang on a nearby tree with a wave of his wand. Harry wondered if he should remove his as well, but Malfoy was already kicking off away from the bank with a neat breaststroke, so he followed him instead, jeans feeling like leaden weights as the denim got steadily saturated with cold water. 

It was freezing, despite the hot day, and Malfoy’s teeth actually started chattering when they’d got a good way out into the middle of the lake, though he seemed not to notice, laughing at Harry when he floundered and splashed. Harry wasn’t a confident swimmer to begin with, and he was very aware of the fact that that this, unlike his pond back home, could very possibly have things like grindylows in it. His ankles stayed free from long-fingered hands, however, and the only thing that bothered them were the ducks, who seemed very interested in what was going on and kept bumping into them and quacking in their faces.

It didn’t help that Malfoy was wet and half-dressed either. His hair was plastered to his head in a way that should have been hilarious and wasn’t, and he kept trying to dunk Harry, which meant they were far too close and Harry’s hands came into contact with chilled, smooth skin under the water more times than was good for his blood pressure.

It wasn’t until the sun was obscured by some clouds that had blown in whilst they were swimming that Malfoy shivered and suggested they head back, Harry nodding gratefully (his toes were numb) and they swam back to the shore together.

Malfoy waded out immediately and went over to his shirt. Harry carefully avoided staring at the way the weight of the water pulled his trousers low on his hips and the drops that ran steadily down his back. He had himself dried and dressed before Harry had even managed to get all the way out onto the bank.

Walking through the grounds of Malfoy’s house, much like the building itself, was a bit like walking through Hogwarts when you were late for class and the castle was in a particularly unhelpful mood: you always ended up coming upon something unexpected and never really got where you were intending to go. Harry had looked out from the lake and seen nothing but empty, green fields all around them and yet they walked what couldn’t have been more than fifty paces away from the bank and right into a meadow filled with flowers so tall they came up to Harry’s waist.

Malfoy came to a sudden stop, folding himself down into the grass so that he would have been completely hidden if Harry hadn’t been watching the spot where he disappeared from view. Harry lay down carefully next to him, trying to avoid crushing any of the flowers, and stared up at the sky.

“That one looks a bit like a CD,” he said, pointing up at a vaguely circular cloud with a hole in the middle.

“What’s a CD?” asked Malfoy.

///

When they got back to Harry’s, they found everyone sprawled in the library, mid-way through a game of Cluedo. 

“Do you not all have homes of your own?” Harry asked, trying to ignore the way his friends’ eyes were flitting between his still-not-quite-dry jeans and Malfoy’s untucked shirt. Malfoy himself seemed unfazed to have walked into a room full of Gryffindors. He peered down at the board interestedly, one hand raking through his hair, which had dried soft and mussed and knotted on one side, a look Harry bizarrely thought was a bit sort of, well, devastatingly handsome.

“Yeah, but yours is so much bigger,” Ron said, stretching.

“And you’ve got booze,” Seamus added, his head in Dean’s lap.

Harry glanced around at the bottles of Pimms he’d bought to take over to the Burrow for a barbecue next week and sighed. “You all owe me about eighty quid.”

Seamus waved his hand dismissively, his eyes closed. Dean picked up his cards from where they were resting face-down on Seamus’ chest and showed one to Hermione, whose turn Harry assumed it was. She made an  _ a-ha! _ noise — Ginny snorted at her — and began scribbling on a piece of paper that was already cramped with notes.

“Eighty pounds?” Luna asked. “You should have gone to the Sainsburys in the village, Harry. They’ve got a deal on.”

They got sucked into the game because Malfoy, to Harry’s simultaneous joy and trepidation, showed no indication of wanting to leave. Harry went to change out of his jeans and when he came back Malfoy had already situated himself in the circle and was being taught, with much enthusiastic yelling and interrupting from everyone, how to play.

Harry noticed Ron in particular taking great pleasure in explaining the rules, even though he himself had never even heard of Cluedo until last month. Malfoy, to his credit, listened to them all talking over each other and nodded along, occasionally shooting Harry these small glances from where he was sitting next to Hermione, looks that Harry had no clue how to interpret.

Cards were re-dealt and Hermione pleaded with until she rolled her eyes and performed a complicated little charm that made the figurines come to life and start attacking each other with tiny candlesticks and revolvers and the like. This was, in Ron’s opinion at least, what made the game worth playing.

“It’s like chess,” he said to Malfoy, watching Reverend Green beat Colonel Mustard over the head with a bit of lead piping. “Only with better weapons.”

Malfoy won, of course, despite joining the game halfway through and never having played it before in his life.

“Absolute blind cheating,” Ron said resignedly, leaning heavily against Hermione, who was curled against the back of the sofa next to him.

“How do you even cheat at Cluedo?” asked Ginny through a wide yawn.

Ron grunted. “I don’t know. Transparency charm on the cards?”

It was clear the group had settled into the kind of tired, pleasant stupor that was an inevitable aftereffect of day drinking and competition taken unnecessarily seriously. There’d barely been any Pimms left when Harry and Malfoy had shown up, but they’d finished it off between them and now Malfoy’s cheeks were slightly flushed and Harry was staring at them, registering vaguely that he probably should stop being so blatant and failing dramatically at doing anything about this realisation.

Malfoy got to his feet. “Well, I’d better leave you all to it, if you’re to have any chance of winning the next game.”

His tone was haughty but not mean, and the most reaction he got out of anyone was a lazy middle finger from Seamus, who was practically asleep on Dean by this point.

“I’ll—,” Harry said, jumping up as well and immediately feeling like an idiot. “Um.”

Malfoy smiled at him in an embarrassed sort of way and turned to leave. Harry followed him out.

They stood in Harry’s front doorway for a bit, Harry not saying anything and desperately wanting to, Malfoy looking at him and leaning back on the doorframe, before Malfoy shook his head, laughed softly in the same sort of self-conscious way he’d smiled before, and left.

“Sent him off with your virtue intact?” Ron asked when Harry walked back in.

“Fuck off,” Harry said jovially, head full of the way Malfoy’s teeth sometimes poked over his bottom lip when he smiled.

Dean laughed. “That’s it now, then, mate?”

Harry looked over at him. “What?”

“Well, that was practically meeting the family, wasn’t it? Seems to be getting pretty official. Should we be expecting invitations anytime soon?”

Harry felt himself flush as everyone laughed and decided he was above stepping deliberately on Dean’s leg as he passed, if only because seven years of sharing a dorm with Seamus meant he knew exactly how dangerous it was to wake him up when he was napping.

Ginny prodded Ron with her foot. “ _ Please _ let’s give him the “what are your intentions with our Harry” talk next time he’s here.”

Harry felt no remorse stepping on  _ her  _ leg.

“Oh, Harry, we’re only teasing,” Hermione said to him as he reached her, tugging on his hand until he folded himself down next to her (right where Malfoy had been sitting, and was Harry imagining that the floorboards still felt warm?) and put his head on her shoulder. “Only, you get this look on your face when he’s around that makes me want to go for the smelling salts.”

///

As much as he tried to shake them off, the jokes about Malfoy as Harry’s knight in shining armour, who’d ridden in and — in Ginny’s words — saved him from a summer of DIY-induced boredom, stuck. In some ways, Harry couldn’t blame them. Malfoy did invite that kind of friendly ridicule simply by behaving like the toff he was, and Harry could take a bit of ribbing, but it bothered him that his friends seemed to have decided he was acting like the protagonist of a period novel and had been all but literally swept off his feet by Malfoy’s wit and charm. Never mind that that wasn’t exactly miles away from the truth.

He frowned at the thought, elbow deep in a patch of toothy plants that had sprouted under his kitchen window. (God knew  _ how  _ magical plants had even made it onto this property — Harry’d forgotten pretty much everything he learned in Herbology, though he was sure Neville would start saying something about self-seeding perennials if he asked.)

“ _ I’m  _ not the bloody damsel in distress,” he muttered to himself, wincing as a fanged geranium tried to sink its teeth into his forearm. He knew he should have spent longer rooting around for his old Herbology gloves — these plants had always had it in for him, for some reason — but he’d been eager to get out into the sunshine.

Not that this was a stupid romance novel, he reminded himself sternly, but if it  _ were _ , Malfoy would surely be the one in need of rescuing, or romancing, or whatever it was the others were implying. He’d always thought Malfoy was the type that seemed like he belonged in that kind of book anyway, what with growing up how he did and what he chose to wear and how he spoke. And Harry was, purely based on previous experience, and much to his chagrin, the more..  _ heroic _ of the two of them. Though, honestly, he felt he’d done enough saving people to last him a lifetime by this point. It would be nice for someone to save  _ him  _ for a change. Or, not save necessarily, but take care of. Maybe help onto the back of a horse. Give him a hand with doing up the house. Push him down into the soft grass, or up against a tree..

Or, he thought, swearing as the geranium took advantage of his momentary lapse in concentration and bit him on the thumb, come and protect him from these godforsaken plants.

That evening, after dinner, he and Malfoy were sitting side by side on Malfoy’s patio, debating the merits of having to move to get another bottle of wine when Malfoy made a noise and jumped up.

“Oh,” he said,“I can’t believe I haven’t shown you yet,” and he pulled Harry up with one hand and strode out into the dark garden.

Harry followed him, a little reluctant to leave their spot, lit by the warm light spilling out of the kitchen, noticing idly how even this back corner of Malfoy’s garden, barely illuminated by the stars, put the entirety of his own four acres to shame.

They stopped at the perimeter wall, which had a small, shabby-looking greenhouse built up against it. Malfoy tapped his wand on a pane of glass, humming in concentration, and pulled the door open.

Harry could see nothing but darkness within, which was odd considering the entire thing was made of glass. “In there?” he asked.

Malfoy huffed. “ _ Yes _ , Potter. Come on.”

Unsure how good of an idea it was to follow Malfoy into a no doubt cramped, humid, dark space with half of a bottle of wine in his system, he came warily forward. When he stepped through the glass door however, he found himself not on the inside of a greenhouse at all, but in the middle of a vineyard that looked to be, if he had to hazard a guess, on the side of a hill somewhere in southern Europe. He blinked as his eyes were assaulted by the midday sun. Here, it was apparently still noon.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Malfoy said, grinning. 

Harry could only nod, staring around.

“We’re not actually abroad,” he continued, evidently seeing the confusion on Harry’s face. “I mean, magical liminal spaces need to draw on  _ somewhere _ , so I may have borrowed a bit of our Italian estate, but it’s not like we transported there when we walked through the door. I just took the scenery and sort of— shoved it in here.”

“And that’s why it’s still daylight here?” Harry asked, looking over at him.

He nodded, pleased, like he hadn’t expected Harry to be interested. He got especially rambly when he was tipsy and it made Harry’s knees feel a bit melty. “Yes. Keeping the atmospheric charms at a higher level of sunlight exposure means the grapes mature faster.”

The whole thing was, undeniably, very impressive. Harry was starting to realise that Malfoy was actually an incredibly talented wizard, and that not spending all his time being a prejudiced bastard had allowed him to develop his skills to the point where Harry thought he should bring Hermione round with him just so someone who really knew how to appreciate good spellwork could see it. Or, in this case, Neville, who would probably love to build something like this in his own garden. He was always complaining about not having enough room for his plants.

Malfoy turned and plucked a grape from a vine behind him, tossing it to Harry. “You can try them,” he said over his shoulder as he set off down the row of plants, hands trailing in the leaves. He stopped every few feet to check something, bending to inspect the fruit.

Harry bit into the grape. It exploded in his mouth, the juice sweet and tangy.

“This is,” he said, catching up to Malfoy. “I mean.”

He couldn’t put it into words, both because this was overwhelmingly advanced magic, and because paying Malfoy a direct compliment out loud still felt weird, no matter how much his internal monologue liked to linger on the many virtues of everything from Malfoy’s soft hair to his bitten fingernails.

Malfoy didn’t seem to mind his inarticulacy — the look on Harry’s face must have been praise enough, because he only smiled at him, wide and unabashed, like a kid who’d just mastered their first levitating charm, and Harry’s heart did a very uncomfortable little flop in his chest.

He started explaining the process then, how to tell when the fruit was ripe, and how, traditionally, if you wanted fizz you had to extend the fermentation period, but if you were a wizard you could just use a carbonation charm, though sparkling wine was apparently for the lower classes and Malfoy wouldn’t be caught  _ dead  _ drinking it, unless the grapes came from the Champagne region itself, and only then if it was elf-made. Harry, as usual, wasn’t listening in a great amount of detail, though he made an effort, because Malfoy seemed so enthusiastic.

“Can you show me?” Harry asked, when they’d wound their way up and down the paths between the plants and were back where they started.

“We can’t make wine out of any of  _ these _ ,” Malfoy said, horrified. “This is only my first crop. It has to be harvested and left to mature for at least a decade before it’ll be anywhere near drinkable.”

Harry looked at him.

Malfoy sighed. “Lucky for you I dragged all the good vintages over from the Manor when I moved.”

The wine cellar back at the house was much less pleasant than the greenhouse-turned-vineyard. Harry was surprised at the complete lack of windows until Malfoy started talking about the effects of direct sunlight on oak barrels. He let him prattle on as he grabbed several bottles, lifting them up to try and see better in the near darkness. He didn’t really know anything about wine but he inspected the labels anyway, feeling Malfoy’s eyes on him as he tapered off.

“Red?” he asked, holding up a dusty bottle.

Malfoy snorted. “Obviously.”

Harry passed him the bottle when he held out a hand, and the edge of his palm met Harry’s fingertips for a brief, pulse-stopping moment.

Malfoy shook his head when he looked at the bottle Harry had chosen. “Such unrefined tastes, Potter.  _ You  _ could do with maturing in here for a decade.”

Harry suppressed a small shiver at the idea of being stuck in a small space for so long (though he was already feeling quite unacceptably shivery from the accidental hand touch, so it might have been that) and headed for the stairs.

Malfoy gave him a weird look but let him lead them back up to the kitchen, Harry not even realising his chest had tightened until they were back in the warm light and he could breathe again, unsure if his breathlessness was due to lingering claustrophobia or prolonged close proximity to Malfoy.

He tried to get Malfoy to show him the proper way to taste the wine, pouring it into crystal glasses and inhaling deeply, but it turned out that was where Malfoy’s knowledge ran out, and he just made a load of stuff up, telling Harry it was all about the  _ sound  _ of the wine in the glass and laughing when Harry fell for it, obligingly holding it up to his ear and swilling it around. He thumped Malfoy on the arm and they drank the rest of the bottle sitting on the kitchen floor, back to the cupboards as the moon rose higher and higher outside the window.

///

_ Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still. _

Well, Harry thought, snapping the book closed and sinking further back into his armchair, Mr Rochester was a bit of a bastard, if you asked him, and someone should, because Harry had apparently turned into the kind of person who had strong opinions on fictional characters.

He hadn’t set out intending to read a load of historical romance, but a string of chilly, wet days had forced him inside and his library was full and waiting. It seemed a shame not to utilise it and it felt like being back at Hogwarts, sitting there curled up in the evenings, even though he’d barely opened a book that wasn’t required reading at school, and even then it’d been with poor enthusiasm. Hermione would be proud, he thought. And very possibly amused, considering what he was choosing to read. There were just so many novels like the ones his friends had been referencing all summer lining the walls, and he hadn’t had a chance to go and buy any others yet.

Annoyingly, the more he read the more he realised that actually, the others had a point about him and Malfoy. Malfoy was the one who came from stupid amounts of money and did things like swim in lakes that he owned and look down his long, straight nose at people. It was Harry who’d grown up the poor little abused orphan and had somehow succeeded beyond his position, much as he cringed away from thinking of it like that.

And if Malfoy, one day, decided he might like to carry someone carefully over the wild, uneven moors, one arm under said person’s knees and one around their back (Hampshire was actually predominantly marsh and downland, but this was obviously all hypothetical, so it didn’t matter), then who was Harry to stop him? And, furthermore, what was to stop Harry imagining, in the safety of his own head, that he might be that very person? Malfoy, at least, was a damn sight nicer to Harry than that Rochester bloke seemed.

“Been doing some reading, have you?” Hermione asked when she spotted  _ Jane Eyre  _ face down on the floor of the library, Harry’s page held open. There was barely concealed laughter in her tone, and Harry, with great effort, fought down a blush.

When he didn’t answer, she poked him in the side. “Getting some ideas?”

He slapped her hand away and she laughed outright, knocking her elbow against his. There was a brief pause, both of them staring down at the illustration of the intertwined couple on the book cover.

“Do you,” Harry said, and stopped. Scratched his nose. “You know. Have a problem with it. If there were anything, let’s say, to have a problem with.”

Hermione rolled her eyes, seemingly at his inability to reference by name what — or who — he was talking about. “I suppose I don’t, Harry. He seems nice enough, these days, and he’s never been bad looking.” She pulled a face. “He’s so..  _ rich,  _ though.”

Harry laughed, relieved in spite of himself. “ _ I’m  _ rich, Hermione. And I don’t think you’re doing too badly yourself, either.”

She gave him a withering look. “Oh, you know what I mean. He’s never wanted for anything. He has a lake half the size of Windermere.”

Hermione’s parents had moved to the Lake District on their return from Australia and she liked reminding them all of her newly acquired geographical knowledge of the area. Everyone in Harry’s life had gone bloody lake mad.

“So you really don’t care then? Other than the fact he’s stupidly wealthy?”

Hermione smiled at him. “I want you to be happy,” she said. “Just make sure he’s the one paying for the wedding,” and she turned and high-fived Ginny on her way out, who was just coming through the door and had snorted into her peach as she caught the tail end of their conversation.

///

On Wednesday, he and Malfoy got caught in an unexpected downpour.

(Well, not entirely unexpected. “It’s going to rain,” Malfoy had said when Harry suggested a walk and Harry had looked pointedly out at the cloud-free sky through the window. Malfoy’d only raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m leaving my coat here, Potter, and if I get drenched it’s entirely on you.”)

The clouds must have snuck in whilst Harry was distracted with other things, like the strip of bare ankle between Malfoy’s trouser leg and his shoe, and he was therefore pretty surprised when the first drops started falling. It was thick and heavy before he’d even registered Malfoy’s resigned expression, and by then they were out in the middle of the countryside, nowhere remotely close to any kind of shelter.

“This is terribly dramatic,” Malfoy said, raising his voice over the sound of the rain. Harry didn’t answer — his eyes kept being drawn to where Malfoy’s white shirt was turning steadily translucent under the deluge. He could almost see one pink nipple through the fabric.

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed at Harry’s distraction. “Potter.”

“Yeah. What? Ok. Um, run for it?” There wasn’t much point bothering with umbrella charms at this point — it had been less than a minute, and they were both already almost wet through.

They ran side by side back the way they’d come, Malfoy pulling slightly ahead and still finding time to turn and smirk at him, their feet slipping in the wet grass. 

When they reached the house, Harry slammed the door behind them and leant back against it, laughing, both of them out of breath and soaked to the skin.

There was a brief, loaded pause as they dripped steadily onto the floorboards. Harry opened his mouth.

“You could—,” he said, not meeting Malfoy’s eyes. “I mean, I have things you can borrow. You should stay and let those dry.” He rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, jerking his head at Malfoy’s wet clothes. “No point going back out in this.”

He resolutely ignored the fact that Malfoy, as a capable wizard, had at least two methods of getting from here to his home without having to go out in the rain.

“No,” Malfoy said, apparently joining Harry in his game of wilful ignorance. “Better not.”

“Ok.” Harry felt his mouth start to pull up into what would inevitably become an embarrassingly large grin and bit his lip to curb it. “I’ll grab—” he jerked a thumb behind him. “You can— bathroom,” and then turned and fled up the stairs before he could stammer at Malfoy any more.

He had a minor freakout, standing over the open drawer in his bedroom and staring at his clothes. What if Malfoy usually slept in some kind of nightshirt, all ruffles and silk like his usual attire? Did he need underwear? Was it weird to even consider lending him some? Harry supposed he could dry his own — probably damp, and clinging — underwear with a spell, but if he did that then surely they’d both be acknowledging the fact that he could use magic and didn’t need to borrow clothes at all.

He ended up grabbing a clean t-shirt and some pajama pants, trying not to think too hard about it (and promptly realising it was too late for that), and went out along the hallway to where he could hear the sound of the shower from behind the bathroom door.

He knocked, hoping Malfoy hadn’t actually got in yet, and passed the clothes through when the door opened, one pale hand appearing through the gap, his face hot and turned in the opposite direction.

He went to get changed himself then, pulling a towel roughly through his hair and eyeing the resulting mess in the mirror, slipping into dry clothes. The house was cool, which was a relief when the sun was beating down, but he was chilled from the rain and went downstairs to get a fire going in the sitting room. If nothing else, Malfoy could hang his clothes up by it and they could both continue pretending there were no such thing as drying charms.

He was in the kitchen when he heard the soft pad of footsteps on the stairs, though he didn’t turn around, busy getting mugs out of the cupboard.

“Thanks,” Malfoy said softly from behind him. “My hair would have been a nightmare if I’d just let it dry like that.”

“No problem.” Harry summoned the tea bags. “Tea?”

“Please,” Malfoy said, and Harry’s reply died in his throat as he turned around to face him.

He looked weird in normal clothes —  _ Harry’s  _ clothes — and by weird Harry meant  _ good _ , sort of more human and touchable. Not that Harry would— or  _ should _ , but still. What was he supposed to be doing again?

“Potter?”

“Right,” Harry said, shaking his head. “Tea.”

///

It would have been understandable, considering the circumstances under which Harry had managed to get Malfoy to stay the night, to suggest that he was lying about only having the one bed. But he wasn’t. He hadn’t furnished the other bedrooms yet, and his friends were always happy sharing or piling cushions on the floor, so he hadn’t seen the point in prioritising it. Now he was standing in the doorway with Malfoy next to him, he was realising how this might look.

Malfoy eyed the room, the pictures on the walls, the window, pushed open slightly as Harry always had it. The sound of the rain, still falling, filtered through.

“Sorry,” Harry said, even though he’d said it several times already. He didn’t want Malfoy to feel like he had to sleep in Harry’s bed, but the only other option was the sofa and somehow he didn’t think that suggestion would go down very well.

Malfoy didn’t look particularly bothered, however. Interested, a little tired, maybe, but not repulsed. He ignored Harry’s apology and went over to the bed, which had come with the house and was therefore carved out of dark wood and quite ornate. It was even hung with heavy, velvet fabric, though Harry had never actually closed the hangings around himself. He’d left the long curtains tucked back against the wall since he’d moved in. Malfoy seemed like the kind of bloke who liked a well-curtained bed, though, so he went over tugged on them and immediately covered them both in a cloud of dust.

“Sorry,” he coughed, waving his hands. “I don’t usually, ah. I sleep with them open.”

“Evidently,” Malfoy said, wrinkling his nose.

“I like to be able to feel the breeze,” Harry continued unnecessarily, wondering how Malfoy could possibly still look so appealing covered in dust. Probably something to do with the way Harry’s t-shirt was threatening to slip down one of his shoulders. “And I like the sun waking me up. It’s too dark with the hangings closed, messes with my sleep rhythm, or. You know. Whatever it’s called.”

It also reminded him of Hogwarts, lying there with heavy curtains all around him, which, whilst still his first real home, had not been the site of many a memorably restful night. His dormmates had always complained if he wanted the window open (“It’s mid-January, Harry and we’re halfway up a hill in Scotland. If you want to wake up with no toes and one ball missing, go sleep in the forest.”) and closing your hangings was a necessity in terms of both privacy and noise control when you were rooming with four teenage boys, at least two of whom would snore on any given night. Not to mention all the nightmarish joys of sharing your brain with Voldemort for the majority of your teenage years. Didn’t exactly make for a restful sleeping environment.

He didn’t say any of this out loud, of course, just trailed off and hoped Malfoy wasn’t going to insist they close the curtains. Or demand a different room. Or have a sudden remembrance that he had a wand and could be back home in his own, no doubt heavily draped bed in two seconds flat.

He didn’t. He looked at Harry, sneezed four times in a row and climbed into bed, shoving the hangings back out of the way and expelling yet more dust into the room. Harry grimaced; he hoped Malfoy didn’t think he was a slob. He’d just never thought to hoover his bed curtains. Malfoy sneezed again. He was on Harry’s side but Harry didn’t really feel he could ask him to shift over.

Instead he climbed in next to him, shucking his joggers before he could think too hard about it. He wasn’t about to sleep in more clothes than he usually did and wake up overheated and sweaty with Malfoy in his bed. “Bless you,” he said belatedly into the dark room.

Malfoy opened one eye to give him an asymmetrical glare and rummaged around under the duvet until he found his wand, clearing the settling dust with one flick of it. Then he set it on the bedside table, buried himself further into both the covers and the neckline of Harry’s t-shirt and mumbled something that might have been a “Goodnight”, though could just as conceivably have been a “Sod off.” Harry, horrifyingly, found himself charmed by either prospect.

///

Harry woke early the next morning, as he usually did considering he slept in a room where the only barrier between him and the 5am summer sunrise was a piece of gauzy off-white fabric that Luna and Dean had half-heartedly tacked over the window. The bed next to him was empty, but still warm. He lay there sleepily for a bit, wondering if Malfoy had left already, and how he would feel about that if it was true, and whether he should be concerned that if it wasn’t true, Malfoy was likely wandering around his house, unsupervised.

It occurred to him that there were things he still didn’t know about Malfoy that he wanted to find out, like whether he was a morning person or the kind of person that slept in someone’s bed and then left without saying anything about it. He didn’t snore — Harry had found that out last night — but he did curl himself up very small when he slept, and he wasn’t easily woken. Harry had still had dust up his nose and had sneezed a few times after they’d fallen quiet, but Malfoy hadn’t stirred once. It had set Harry’s brain unhelpfully down the path of what exactly he would have to do to wake Malfoy up, and it’d been a long time before he himself had dropped off.

The radio was playing when he made his way downstairs, and Malfoy’s coat and shoes were still in the hallway, but there was no sign of Malfoy himself. Harry put the kettle on, yawning, and got two mugs out, assuming Malfoy was probably somewhere getting dressed, or in the bathroom. It was unlikely he’d left without putting his shoes on — the rain had stopped but the grass outside shone wet in the morning sun.

He was just putting the milk back in the fridge when the back door swung open and Malfoy came in.

“Sorry,” he said, smiling at Harry. “I went to see if you had any chamomile in the garden for tea.” He’d put his trousers from yesterday back on, neatly pressed, but he was still wearing Harry’s borrowed t-shirt, and his feet were bare.

“Oh,” Harry said, blinking at the image he made. “No, I don’t, sorry. And I sort of.. already made you a cup.” He gestured at the mug awkwardly, strong and milky, just how he thought Malfoy liked it, resisting the urge to turn away and hide his face, suddenly embarrassed at the weird not-quite-morning-after dynamic. “I have some pastries, too, if you want. I already took the pecans off these ones, I know you don’t like..” but he trailed off, because Malfoy was looking at him with such open affection in his gaze, standing there in the doorway with the morning sun behind him, that Harry found himself at a loss for what to say.

In three short steps Malfoy had crossed the kitchen towards Harry and kissed him so enthusiastically that he actually felt his back start to bend a bit, as though Malfoy was going to embrace the cliche and dip him like they really were in some kind of romance novel.

“Ow,” Harry said, muffled against Malfoy’s mouth as their noses got squashed together.

Malfoy barely pulled back half an inch. “Sorry,” he murmured into Harry’s mouth, sounding quite the opposite, and shoved his tongue back in.

Well, shoved was perhaps not the word. Malfoy kissed like he did everything else: somewhat expertly, and with an air of elegance and confidence that would have made you think he was doing it right even if he wasn’t. His arms were circled steadily around Harry’s waist and his skin smelled nice — fresh from outside and a little salty from the early heat of the sun. Harry could feel it under his nose.

Malfoy pulled back again after a long minute, letting out a breath that hit Harry in the face and smelled weirdly, though not unpleasantly, of coconut.

“Just for future reference,” he said, “I drink chamomile in the morning. But English breakfast is fine for the rest of the day.”

“It literally has  _ breakfast  _ in the name,” Harry started to say, but Malfoy kissed him again, quite effectively cutting him off.

///

“What’s that?” Harry asked, pointing over at a wooden building he’d never noticed before. They were walking through one of Malfoy’s many fields and not holding hands, though Harry also wasn’t stopping the side of his little finger from brushing against Malfoy’s on every other step. Malfoy had kissed him for a long time yesterday, finally leaving him there, stupid and smiling, around mid-morning, and still Harry’s whole body was going haywire over this small amount of contact.

Malfoy looked where he was pointing. The rain was back, though it was barely a drizzle, and they were mostly ignoring it. “Oh, the old barn. I think it was used for storage, when this land was still farmed.”

He changed their course, taking Harry over to it, and they ducked inside.

All of Malfoy’s horses were in the newer stable block, leaving the space quiet and empty, the weak sunlight slanting through the gaps between the wood and falling onto the hay-strewn floor beneath, an occasional drop of rain trickling after. There was a strong smell, not off-putting, but earthy and warm. Harry watched a lone chicken peck about on the ground just inside the door.

“It’s nice in here,” he said, and pushed Malfoy up against the wall before he could make any kind of joke with regards to insinuations on the location of Harry’s birth and the reasons why he might feel at home in a barn.

The shirt Malfoy was wearing today was ever so slightly sheer anyway, so Harry felt he could hardly be blamed, and that it was remarkably restrained of him to have even lasted this long without getting his hands on it.

Kissing Malfoy was just as nice as he remembered, if not nicer, because he felt less blindsided this time, and Malfoy was a bit damp from the rain and looked sort of dishevelled in an unbearably attractive way and he pushed one of his thighs between Harry’s without Harry having to say anything. He span them around after a bit, pressing Harry into the wall until Harry’s hands got all grabby and then Malfoy got on his knees in the dirt.

Harry stared down at him, sparing a fleeting, triumphant thought for his friends, who were so convinced that he was practically akin to a blushing heroine from an eighteenth century novel.  _ This  _ kind of thing certainly didn’t happen in those books. It was all scandalous flashing of ankles and soft caress of fingers on the inside of a wrist. Not that Harry would mind so much if Malfoy had actually gotten on his knees to get better access to Harry’s wrists. He had nice hands.

“This isn’t romantic at all,” Harry said, out loud, stupid with desire and losing for a second the distinction between his rambling thoughts and what was coming out of his mouth.

Malfoy pulled back to stare incredulously up at him. “Sorry, were you expecting rose petals? Shall I wait for you to light some candles?”

Harry flushed and tried to glare. “No, I was just thinking about something—”

“Well, stop it.” Malfoy’s surprise melted into a sort of amused frown and then his face went all determined and he got quite a lot of Harry into his mouth and sucked, hard, so that Harry thought his knees might be about to give out. He scrabbled around until his hands sank into Malfoy’s hair, which Malfoy seemed to like if the enthusiastic noise was anything to go by. Harry felt the vibrations all the way up his spine.

“Fuck— ing hell,” he said, rather composedly he thought, until Malfoy snorted a laugh at the way his voice had gone all high and wavery mid-word, and made the vibration thing happen again.

Harry had never had someone laugh with his dick in their mouth before, and it was weirdly  _ not  _ weird that he was experiencing it for the first time with Malfoy, someone his younger self could not have associated less with laughter, or blow jobs for that matter, unless you counted some of the cruder insults they used to throw at each other back at school.

Malfoy had him pinned to the barn wall, the small, soft movement of his thumbs over the skin of Harry’s exposed hips unreasonably arresting considering he was also mouthing messily up Harry’s cock, occasionally pulling back to suck him down again. It was sloppy (deliberately so, Harry suspected — he doubted Malfoy ever did anything in a way that wasn’t premeditated), and spit was sort of getting everywhere. Harry smoothed one thumb over the hollow of Malfoy’s cheek and it came away wet, and Malfoy nuzzled into the touch in a way that made all the muscles in Harry’s stomach clench.

He pulled off again momentarily, shooting Harry a wide-eyed look of would-be innocence (would-be if not for the smirk, if not for the fact that he’d undone his trousers and released one of Harry’s hips to shove a hand down there and grind into the heel of it) and readjusted his position, shuffling on his knees.

When he got his mouth back on Harry, he angled sideways, so that the head of Harry’s cock met the soft inside of his cheek and Harry could do nothing but pant and watch and  _ feel _ , the inside of Malfoy’s mouth so hot and smooth, the stretch of his cheek obscene.

“ _ Oh _ ,” Harry said, a short, breathless syllable, and Malfoy leaned back then, and just sat there, eyes widening meaningfully, like he wanted something but wouldn’t ask for it, even if his mouth was no longer occupied. Harry sucked his lower lip between his teeth to stop his own mouth hanging open gormlessly and considered.

All notions of romance aside, it was basic politeness to at least ask someone before you came on their face, but Malfoy was the one who’d pulled back and was staring up at Harry, waiting, whilst his hand moved steadily where his mouth had just been. Harry hadn’t the breath to warn him that he was close, was pretty sure Malfoy knew regardless, could feel it in the way Harry’s thighs were shaking, and he was distracted by Malfoy’s mouth anyway, swollen lips slightly parted and damp, so much so that it was difficult to form words.

After a short moment his decision was made for him — Malfoy’s wrist twisted and his mouth opened wider on a quiet noise as he ground forward into his own hand and Harry couldn’t have stopped himself coming even if he’d wanted to.

It was arguably the least romantic thing he could have done really, a thought that came to him wildly as the first stripe hit Malfoy’s chin, except he felt it in more than just his cock as Malfoy sat there on his knees in the hay and took it. Something swelled in Harry’s chest and shuddered through him so intensely that as the feeling ebbed into aftershocks he had the ridiculous urge to do something decidedly dramatic, like scoop Malfoy up into his arms and kiss him on the forehead in thanks.

He managed to refrain, thankfully, though mostly because he felt boneless and sated and disinclined to move.

Malfoy rubbed at his face distractedly.

“It’d be an awful fire hazard, anyway,” he said, continuing their earlier conversation like there hadn’t been a dozen throaty, hitched noises in the interim.

“What?” Harry breathed, brain slow and lazy.

“Candles in here, with all this hay and wood. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. And I don’t even like roses really, snapdragons are much prettier.”

Harry stared at him, at the bits of come he hadn’t managed to wipe away with the back of his hand. “Say ‘wood’ again.”

Malfoy laughed. It was surprisingly brilliant, being the person to make him do that. Harry let his knees give out and sank down against the barn wall, pulling Malfoy towards him and kissing the smile right off his face until he sighed and shifted half into Harry’s lap and made a small, needy noise into Harry’s mouth and Harry decided to hell with making him laugh, he was going to make it his life’s work to get  _ that  _ sound out of Malfoy as many times as he could before either of them met their (hopefully very distant and painless) deaths.

Malfoy’s trousers were open but his untucked shirt was so drapey and soft that as he leaned into Harry it kept billowing forward and getting in the way, hindered further by the fact that Harry was reluctant to stop kissing him long enough to actually look at what he was doing. After two attempts where his hands met only silky fabric he huffed in frustration and grabbed Malfoy’s wrists, pulling them away from where they were tangled in his hair and guiding them behind Malfoy’s back.

“Hold this,” he said against Malfoy’s mouth, bunching up the shirt fabric and tucking it into his fists so it was out of the way. There was a short moment where Harry had a second to appreciate the position — Malfoy on his knees over Harry, hands behind his back because Harry had told him to keep them there, Harry  _ finally  _ able to get his cock out of his stupidly tight trousers — before Malfoy nudged at him with his nose and smeared their mouths together again.

Harry got down to it after that, wrapping a hand around Malfoy and licking into his mouth. Some of Harry’s own come got on his face but he found it didn’t bother him as much as he might have thought. He could taste himself on Malfoy’s tongue too, that fruity, tropical something he’d smelled before just discernible underneath it, and he made a mental note to ask exactly what kind of dental charms Malfoy was using to make his mouth taste like a pina colada.

Malfoy’s hips started to roll demandingly into Harry’s hand, chest rising and falling as he breathed, these deep, quick breaths that made lazy heat flare low in Harry’s stomach. He could probably go for another round after this, if Malfoy was up for it. It seemed a shame to get off here amongst all this hay and not have a very literal roll in it.

“What are you smiling about, Potter?” Malfoy said, voice gone deep and a bit strangled.

Harry shook his head, unable to curb his grin even as Malfoy somehow managed to roll his eyes in exasperation and shuffle nearer to Harry at the same time. He was close, Harry could feel it in the way his body had gone tense and jittery.

“Remember just now when I came on your face?” Harry asked cheerily and Malfoy groaned and dropped his forehead onto Harry’s shoulder. In this new position Harry could see the muscles of Malfoy’s back shifting and the way his grip on the shirt had tightened so that his knuckles had gone white. Harry tightened his own in response, slowing down a bit and squeezing harder until Malfoy whined and put his teeth on Harry’s collarbone.

He kept the press of his mouth patiently gentle for a while, letting Harry continue the slower pace, but then he made this small, cracked-open noise and bit down and Harry decided he needed to see what it looked like when Malfoy came, right now. His breathing sped up alongside Harry’s hand and he went very still, his breath a hot, damp gasp into Harry’s chest. Harry let the fingertips of his free hand slip around Malfoy’s back and a small way into the waistband of his trousers, a barely-there suggestion, and Malfoy finished into his hand, his hips bucking before his body stilled and sagged.

He sat back and looked at Harry. There was a damp mark on Harry’s t-shirt where his mouth had been and he thumbed it gently, quiet as his breathing returned to normal.

Harry shifted, not wanting Malfoy to get off of him but needing to move the leg that was bent awkwardly underneath them before he lost feeling in it completely. The movement caused him to lose his flip-flop and Malfoy caught sight of it, lying there on the ground. He groaned.

“I can’t believe we did  _ that _ for the first time whilst you were wearing  _ those _ .”

Harry laughed at him. “What’s wrong with my flip-flops?” He himself was slightly more concerned with the ethics of the fact that they’d just had sex in front of the chicken, who was still pecking around in the doorway.

Malfoy sighed. “What’s right with them, Potter? If I wanted to see your hairy toes I’d go down Knockturn after midnight and buy those photos from that dodgy stand.”

Harry, who’d started running his fingers absently through Malfoy’s hair, choked on his own spit.

“I’m going to  _ Incendio _ them when you’re not looking,” Malfoy continued, wriggling his head pointedly until Harry’s fingers started moving again.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “Can we go back to the feet photos?”

“Absolutely not.”

They sat there curled into each other for a few moments, the rain lightening to a sporadic sort of drizzle outside.

“Do you really not like roses?” Harry said eventually into the quiet.

Malfoy shrugged, his body shifting against Harry’s with the movement. “They’re nice enough.”

“I’ll get you some snapdragons.”

“No need.” He pressed a kiss to Harry’s shoulder. “I’ve a whole plot of them in the walled garden.”

///

His friends came over that weekend, and Harry tried his best to act as if nothing had changed, even though his chest felt all tight and obvious whenever he thought about Malfoy, and he was having a hard time keeping a smile off of his face.

He needn’t have bothered though, as none of them even noticed a difference. It made him paranoid that he’d actually been this conspicuously into Malfoy all along and he was the only one who hadn’t properly realised it.

It took until lunchtime for anyone to even mention Malfoy, which was unusual in itself, since they normally liked to tease him mercilessly.

Hermione leaned across the picnic blanket they’d spread out in the garden and said: “You’ve got straw in your hair,” picking it out carefully.

Harry felt his face heat. It had been a whole twenty-four  _ hours  _ since he and Malfoy had been together. It wasn’t like he washed his hair everyday but still, he didn’t want to invite questions if they hadn’t already caught on.

Not that it was a secret, obviously, he just wasn’t especially eager to tell his friends how accurate their jokes had ended up being, how it  _ had  _ been irritatingly romantic, now he’d stopped to think about it, the two of them in the barn with the soft rain outside. How Malfoy had laughed, and his smile had been all relaxed and happy like Harry had never seen before, and it had smelled like damp earth and hay. It was something straight out of a Jilly Cooper novel, and Harry had only read a few of those because they’d been £1.50 in the charity shop and he’d bought a whole tote-bag (Luna-gifted and patterned with sunflowers) full of miscellaneous titles without really looking too closely at them.

Hermione looked at his flushed cheeks and made a perceptive humming noise.

“Malfoy has a barn, doesn’t he?” Ginny asked innocently.

Harry threw his flip flop at her.

///

The summer seemed to stretch on after that, full of long, hot days and tape measures and wallpaper and Malfoy.

The time they spent together didn’t really change, except that the ways in which they ruined Malfoy’s shirts were now a lot more inventive and a lot less platonic. They still went swimming in Malfoy’s lake and slept in Harry’s bed and Malfoy kept beating all Harry’s friends at board games and Harry even managed to get him to watch awful telly with them, which he agreed to only on the condition that he could “contribute some decorum to the evening” by bringing over the expensive wine from his cellar.

Harry also tried to convince him to move his bed into the room with the stained glass window and make it the master suite, because the way he looked in there, spread out on the floor underneath Harry with the colours playing over his skin, was permanently imprinted onto Harry’s brain. Malfoy only scoffed though, and asked Harry who exactly he thought he was dealing with, someone who could survive with that little storage space? Harry supposed he had a point. (Yes, he’d seen the huge closet in Malfoy’s actual bedroom, and yes, a scary amount of it was taken up with white shirts.)

“When you move into Malfoy Manor 2.0,” Ginny asked one Friday night, hanging over his shoulder, “can I have your room?”

Harry, who’d literally just walked through the front door, shoved her off. No one was moving anywhere. He and Malfoy were both much too attached to their respective houses, and anyway, he hadn’t spent the whole summer battling with DIY for nothing. He ignored the small voice in his head that said he hadn’t spent the whole summer with Malfoy for nothing, either.

Ginny had somehow disconnected and carried the TV upstairs to Harry’s bedroom whilst he’d been picking up the food they’d ordered and now they were all piled on Harry’s bed, drinking his wine (Hermione), dropping noodles on his sheets (Ron) and watching  _ Top of the Pops _ (everyone, though Luna was definitely the one paying the most attention. Somehow she knew all of the words and sang along in between bites of tofu).

Malfoy was busy, doing something with own friends, and Harry was quite glad of a night to just relax and be with people whose facial expressions didn’t consume his every waking hour. It was actually starting to alarm him a bit, how much he liked Malfoy. It was probably good for him to get a bit of distance, but it didn’t stop him wishing secretly that he were there right now, tucked in next to Harry and stealing the chicken out of his pad thai. Which was stupid, because they’d seen each other this morning.

“What kind of band name is  _ Atomic Kitten _ ?” Ron asked derisively through a full mouth.

That started a ridiculous conversation about who could come up with the worst name for a group, and_ that_ somehow turned into who could come up with the most suggestive name and Hermione won and then put the news on and they all dazedly watched it, pushing aside containers and dropping forks off the end of the bed.

When it got late enough that none of them could be bothered to move, they top-and-tailed, in the sense that some heads went one end and some went the other, and Harry somehow ended up regaled to the awkward middle zone, without any of his good pillows. Someone extinguished the lamps in their sconces and Ginny yawned loudly, nudging Harry with her shin.

“You need a bigger bed.”

“How would I possibly sleep without your knee in my face?”

“Beats me.” She yawned again.

Luna started singing. Harry wondered idly how it was that the bed felt bigger now than it had when there had only been him and Malfoy in it. He’d spent a solid part of that night trying not to fall asleep in case he accidentally brushed against Malfoy under the covers.

Right on cue, as Harry had come to expect when he thought about Malfoy in the privacy of his own head (and really, when had all his friends decided to become Legilimens and not tell him about it?), Hermione caught Ginny’s yawn and said sleepily, “Your pillow smells like Malfoy.” She was curled up in Harry’s usual spot.

“How do  _ you  _ know what Malfoy smells like?” Ron asked.

“Oh, you know,” Hermione said vaguely, which wasn’t really an answer.

Ron made a noise. “Ginny’s right, y’know,” he said after a pause. “About Malfoy. And you, Harry. It’s all very,” he waved his hand. Harry saw it rise and flop back onto his stomach from the other side of the bed. “ _ Serious _ .”

“Don’t be stupid,” Harry said, halfway to sleep already, warm and comfortable in the darkness despite the crowded bed. “You guys can joke, but it’s really not like I’m about to run over there and ask for his hand in marriage.”

///

“I propose,” Malfoy said, when Harry opened the door to find him on the top step the next morning, “we get out of here. I’m bloody sick of looking at hills and trees and sheep. I need civilisation.”

It took Harry a fair few seconds to get over Malfoy’s choice of wording, considering.

“Ok,” he said eventually, kissing Malfoy clumsily on the side of the head as he came in and making him stumble and blush.

Clearly listening in, his friends appeared on the landing in various states of dress. If Malfoy was surprised to see the lot of them come traipsing out of Harry’s bedroom, he didn’t show it. 

“Morning, Draco,” Luna called down, and Malfoy gave her a little wave.

“I’ll just get my jacket,” Harry said, fetching it as quickly as he could from the pegs by the back door. Leaving Malfoy alone at the mercy of his friends did not seem like a very good idea.

His suspicions were confirmed as he came back through.

“Actually, Malfoy, we did want a word with you about something,” he heard Ginny start to say with a meaningful nudge to Ron, but Harry unapologetically sent a  _ Langlock  _ at her on his way past.

“Alright, we’re leaving.” He determinedly steered Malfoy out of the door, not even bothering to shut it behind them in his haste — Hermione, at least, would remember to secure it on their way out. “And for god’s sake,” he called back over his shoulder, “no one use my toothbrush again.”

They went to Bath, because Harry had never been before and it was reasonably close by, and Malfoy wanted to look at buildings. As buildings went, Harry thought they were pretty beautiful, even with his “frankly shocking” lack of architectural knowledge.

There were lots of small, interesting little shops for them to look in as well, including a jewellers with so many rings in the window that Harry thought, really, someone somewhere had to be having a laugh at his expense.

He got a bit distracted staring at all the bands glinting in the sun and when he turned around Malfoy was down on one knee.

“What are you,” Harry said, his stomach swooping wildly. “What’s happening?”

Malfoy gave him an odd look. He nodded down at his shoe.

“I’m tying my shoelace,” he said slowly.

“Oh,” Harry said stupidly. “I thought maybe— you’d been talking to Ron. Or the others.”

The confusion on Malfoy’s face only deepened. “Sometimes Potter,” he said, fingers creating a neat little bow. “You make absolutely no sense.”

Harry shrugged, his heart still beating weirdly. He really wished his friends had never bloody brought it up in the first place; he was finding it difficult to shake the thought of Malfoy, probably in an impeccable white shirt, and him, and snapdragons lining the aisle, which was ridiculous because he’d only known Malfoy for, well, most of his life, actually, but he’d only really liked him for half of that time and only very recently had he started wanting to do embarrassing things like walk through Bath holding his hand.

He shook his head to clear it as Malfoy straightened up and they headed off down the street again.

“Why didn’t you just do it with magic?” he asked, giving in to the urge and slipping his hand into Malfoy’s.

Malfoy gave him another look. “We’re surrounded by muggles, Potter.”

Harry pulled him to a stop with their joined hands and kissed him. He looked like he thought Harry was missing a few brain cells when he pulled back, but he’d also gone pink. “What was that for?”

Harry shrugged again. “Do I need a reason?” he asked, which made Malfoy go even pinker.

Malfoy bought them ice-cream from a little shop with a counter that opened right out onto the pavement and they ate them as they navigated through the pleasantly busy streets, Malfoy sucking his spoon (because he’d gotten his in a little tub instead of a cone, “like a  _ civilised  _ person, Potter,”) into his mouth in a mildly distracting manner. Twice Harry had to catch himself on cobblestones.

It was only when they ducked down an emptier side road and came out onto a leafy street with a huge church on one side of it that Harry’s impression that the universe, as it had proven many times before, was really out to get him, felt all the more distressingly accurate.

He managed to conceal the slight trip in his step at the sight of the building and was planning on simply walking right past it until Malfoy stopped at the sound of bells and stared up at the steeple, shielding his face from the sun with one hand. That’s when the doors opened and, of course, an entire wedding party began to spill out onto the path, confetti and all.

“Nice day for it,” Malfoy said, as they both watched people file out of the large, wooden doors, laughing and talking and clutching at some truly eye-watering hats that were trying to escape on the breeze. “And the stonework is lovely, I suppose, though I’ve always thought it an odd choice that so many muggles get married in these old buildings. They’re so  _ dark _ inside. Give me a cliff in Barbados any day.”

“Barbados?” Harry was sure his heart had jumped into his throat and that was why his voice sounded all choked and unnaturally high.

Malfoy wasn’t looking at him. “Mhm. Or a field in the South of France.”

“France. Right.” Were they having this conversation? “For a wedding, you mean.”

“Yes.” Malfoy turned to him then, straight faced. “Granger tells me it’s lovely this time of year.”

Harry’s eyes widened and Malfoy broke, throwing his head back and laughing.

“You’re not allowed to talk to my friends anymore,” Harry said, torn between trying to look and grumpy and trying to quell the flutter of  _ something  _ that had erupted in his stomach at Malfoy’s words. Either way, it was very hard to be anything but indecently happy when Malfoy was smiling like that.

“Relax, Potter,” he said, joining their hands again and pulling Harry away from the church. “I was born and bred in this country. I’m not getting married even five feet outside of the Wiltshire border.”

“Good thing you have several perfectly serviceable fields right on your back doorstep then.”

Malfoy grinned. “Isn’t it just?”

**Author's Note:**

> I can’t believe how long this got considering the almost total lack of any real plot. I’d apologise but I’m really not that sorry. If you liked it let me know! Leave some kudos! Tell a friend! Or just have a nice day!  
P.s. if anyone’s at all interested, the piece Draco plays in the piano scene is Nocturne No.2 in E Flat major. what a posh twat, eh? x


End file.
